Table of contents for 10 April 2017 in Open Magazine

editor@openmedianetwork.in LETTER OF THE WEEK Ever since Yogi Adityanath was appointed Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, people have been debating whether he is the right choice to lead the state (‘Modi and The Monk’, April 3rd, 2017). It is still too early to judge. However, if the last few days are anything to go by, then it looks like the state’s people are in for some positive changes they desparately need. He started with banning the use of tobacco products in government offices, made a surprise visit to Lucknow Railway Station, and has asked his officers to work 10-12 hours a day, with biometric checks on attendance. It looks like he means business, and perhaps it is this sort of strict discipline that will lead to good governance in the…

SPARKS FLEW IN the Rajya Sabha on March 29th, when a united opposition lambasted the Government during a debate on the Finance Bill for 2017-18. Charges and counter-charges flew thick and fast, as is often the case when political forces are arrayed unequally—the opposition has an upper hand in the House. But perhaps the sharpest accusation was of Constitutional impropriety. The matter is technical and revolves around the definition of a ‘money bill’. These bills are defined exhaustively in the Constitution, and deal largely with the imposition of taxes. Further, the Speaker of the Lok Sabha has the last word on whether a bill is one such. The Rajya Sabha cannot block such a bill, and even if it suggests amendments to them, the Lower House is free to ignore…

The racism of Indians is never far below the surface. If we have a fetish for fair skin, we are also ruthless about dark skin. But the recent bigotry that unfolded in Greater Noida came into all our homes, thanks to video footage. A mob mercilessly assaulted two brothers from Nigeria who had come to enjoy a KFC meal at the mall. The violence in the video would make any thinking person recoil, as the brutality of the mob against the vulnerability of the individual is all too apparent. Soon after, a young Kenyan woman was also allegedly pulled out of a cab and slapped by a group of men in Greater Noida. While the ‘provocation’ for this mob violence is supposedly the death of a local boy from an…

ON MAY 2ND, 1999, Merve Safa Kavakçı, a 31-year-old newly elected lawmaker from Istanbul, was to take the oath of office for Turkey’s parliament, having won a seat two weeks earlier as a member of a new Islamist party, the Virtue Party. The problem was that Kavakcçıwas among the few Turkish women in politics who wore a headscarf, and no woman had ever entered the Grand National Assembly in one before. In those days, Turkish female lawmakers wore dress suits to parliament. The army had secretly warned President Suleyman Demirel that it might be forced to intervene if Kavakcçı took oath wearing a headscarf. Her own party’s leaders advised her against it, as they feared a coup. In the days before the oath ceremony, the Turkish press, dominated by hardline…

THE STAGE: DHARAMSHALA—arguably the most scenic cricket stadium in the world. The act: the fourth India-Australia Test—perhaps the most exciting series in this country since these two teams met in 2001. The scene: Day Three—evidently the most crucial day of the entire series. The actor: Ravindra Jadeja—possibly the best all-rounder in the game today. The curtain rises. It’s 9.30 am on the third morning of the Dharamshala Test, and the match (hence the series, tied at onea- piece) is in the balance. Balanced with the precarious poise of houses in this Himalayan region, clinging miraculously on to cliff edges. India, with an overnight score of 248 for six, is still 52 runs behind Australia’s first innings total of 300, with the last recognised batting pair of Jadeja and Wriddhiman Saha,…

THE GOLDEN LEGEND Nadeem Aslam Hamish Hamilton 364 Pages | Rs 599 AT THE CENTRE of Nadeem Aslam’s The Golden Legend is a book. And not just any ordinary book either. It’s a ‘large, magnificent book,’ written by the protagonist’s father-inlaw, and we first encounter it in her husband Massud’s hands, on the day he dies. There’s a shoot-out on the street, between two Pakistanis on a motorbike and an American in a car, and Massud and Nargis happen to be there as part of a human chain transferring Islamic books from one of the city’s oldest libraries to its new premises. This incident is pivotal not only because it sets off the chain of events in The Golden Legend—Nargis is threatened by the military to pardon the killer for…

IT IS DIFFICULT to say which occasioned the greater surprise: the results of the Uttar Pradesh Assembly poll or the selection of Yogi Adityanath as Chief Minister of India’s largest state. By the afternoon of May 11th, the studios were full of experts with hang dog expressions trying to figure out either where they miscalculated (if indeed it was an honest misjudgement) or how to somehow save face. The discomfiture was obvious in the case of Congress, Samajwadi Party and Bahujan Samaj Party leaders who had genuinely banked on celebrating a victory. However, there was a parallel drama involving journalists who had blown up lots of their organisation’s money dissecting caste and subcaste when all that was there to report was a huge electoral wave. Under these circumstances, the appointment…

O Romeo, Romeo,who art thou Romeo? Will you deny thy fame and refuse thy name? WITH DUE APOLOGIES to William Shakespeare... but few names have come down lines of literature and been adopted as thoroughly by colloquialists as Romeo. So one must stop to ask, who is Romeo? Did he rise from Ovid’s Metamorphoses only to be adopted by Shakespeare? Did Shakespeare ordain him to be the lover in the most tragic of tales—where both lovers must die? And who is Romeo today? Can we recognise him by the look in his eye? Can Romeo be spotted more easily in Uttar Pradesh than elsewhere? Does he have a weakness for green parks and water bodies? Is he prone to hide beneath umbrellas? And snuggle on benches? And how do we…

IT ALL BOILS DOWN to the adjective. When ‘terror’ is ‘Islamic’, the liberal refrain is that terror has no religion. Then comes a videotaped reminder from elsewhere in the sandy remoteness of the Middle East that the sword’s legitimacy is the Book, or there pops up a man in a balaclava wielding his Kalashnikov and invoking God to glorify the massacre he has just committed. It is sociology, not theology, that fuels the killer’s instincts, argue the apologists who absolve the scripture; it is all written there, and an Islamic variation of the Lutheran reformation alone can humanise the religion, for the future of freedom and tolerance depends on the repudiation of the Book itself, say the heretics. The only certainty in a world where any dispassionate critic of our…

IT WAS SOMETIME in the 1970s that I first learnt that Ashokamitran was a modern Tamil writer known and respected in the West. An article on him in Span magazine suggested that here was an Indian novelist and short story writer whose appeal was universal even if his characters were as Indian as could be. It confirmed my youthful impression of an author who spoke to people like me, in their twenties or thirties, in a simple, uncluttered style, but revealing a deep empathy for Everyman rarely seen in the writing of the time. I had read a few of his short stories and been struck by the economy and appropriateness of his words and his tendency to surprise the reader with little unexpected twists, but without artifice of any…

WONDERS ARE MANY, and among them is the amusing one called the successful political flunky, stooge, follower, suck-up-er. He apes the mannerism and morals—or lack thereof—of his lord and master, who himself, if he is a leader-entrepreneur, is somewhat shrewder and knows the delicate art of balancing criminal narcissism and faux straightness. Bal Thackeray, for all vacuous fire and brimstone, felt the direction of the wind before he let loose his vitriol. He knew when it was okay to beat up south Indians and when he could get away with inciting riots against Muslims. When he knew he could not, he did not. He shuffled between gutter-mouth and King’s English according to the tastes of those before him. He didn’t spend a day in jail and it would have been…

“MY NAME IS Anthony Gonsalves,” sings Amitabh Bachchan (or, rather Kishore Kumar), after he jumps out of a huge Easter egg at the Catholic Gymkhana. Manmohan Desai’s wonderful Amar, Akbar, Anthony is a crazy caper about national integration. Three Hindu brothers, separated on August 15th under the statue of Mahatma Gandhi, are each brought up in a different religion: Amar as a Hindu, Akbar as a Muslim and Anthony as a Christian. The character’s real Hindu name is elided in the film, and we are not told it, but Anthony Gonsalves is said to be the name of a musician in the film industry. Anthony, despite a ‘foreign-sounding’ name, is as much an Indian as the other brothers, and is as much a star, being played by arguably the greatest…

THERE IS SOMETHING terribly modern about the jihadi terrorist violence that has unfolded in the past twenty years or so. Of course, neither terrorism nor jihad is a new phenomenon. Forms of “globalized” terrorism (sowing terror by choosing highly symbolic targets or simply innocent civilians without regard for national borders) developed as early as the late nineteenth century with the anarchist movement, culminating in the first manifestation of global terrorism with the alliance formed by the Baader–Meinhof gang, Palestinian extreme left groups, and the Japanese Red Army in the 1970s. As for the reference to jihad, it is found in the Quran and regularly resurfaces in the Muslim world—particularly through the term mujahid, characteristic of the Algerian Front de Liberation Nationale (FLN) and the Afghan resistance. What is new is…

PRIME MINISTER Narendra Modi’s visit to the US to meet President Donald J Trump is now on the front burner, with an emphasis on ‘deliverables’. If Delhi is keen on easing the H1B visa regime for Indian techies, Washington is eager that Modi sign up for the fourth generation F-16, a deal seen as ‘open sesame’ for endless future transactions on military hardware, and implement the Logistics Exchange Memorandum of Agreement. If the fourth generation F-16 is the key, what does it say about India that the BJP Government is interested in an antique American combat aircraft, optimised for air warfare of the 1970s, as a frontline fighter for the Indian Air Force well into the 21st century? The Lockheed F-16 and the Swedish SAAB (Svenska Aeroplan Aktie Bolag) JAS…

“T-E-T-H-E-R,” I SPELL out as Mithu Sen eagerly composes the word on a sheet of paper. She is stretched elegantly on the diwan, her back against the wall, in her artist husband Samit Das’ study, located in her studio in Faridabad. I was responding to her request for the nuance behind this word I happened to use in a sentence a minute ago—“I’m pretty sure I don’t want anything that tethers me, that’s like an attachment,” I had said. I wondered whether this wordily secret I was sharing would someday manifest in her practice, possibly in its inverted form. Sen, who has an affinity for the connotative possibilities of the prefix ‘un’, would perhaps co-opt the word as ‘untethered.’ I am somewhat intrigued that it hadn’t already been consolidated into…

THE POISON OF LOVE KR Meera Translation: Ministhy S Hamish Hamilton 106 Pages | Rs 299 IF ACCLAIMED MALAYALAM writer KR Meera’s previous book, The Gospel of Yudas, was about a unusual romantic extreme (falling in unrequited love with a man who dives to the bottom of water bodies to salvage drowned corpses), her latest novella, The Poison of Love, situates the desperate love at its centre in a common, if desperately painful, bind. Tulsi—a perfectly average person, just another female IIT graduate who gives up her career upon marriage —falls for the charismatic Madhav. She is his 28th lover, and first wife. The long and short of Tulsi’s journey— from elopement, torrid sex and tender affection (‘I would lie on his chest like a tulsi leaf, like a feather’)…

FOR ME, A meal has to be hot. Over two decades ago, when I entered the buttery of my college in England, my choice as a vegetarian was non-existent. Limited to one item: salad. The hot items were lamb or veal or chicken. After day 10, I switched to meat. Well, I asked for the gravy and ate it with potatoes—thankfully, a staple in an English diet. Little did I know that I was following the intuitions of the ancients, who, despite having no scientific tools, were on to a good thing. Raw food was a no-no in ancient and medieval times. This was because, as Stephen Le writes in 100 million Years of Food: What our Ancestors Ate and Why It Matters Today, between 40 million and 16 million…

The Spy Who Never Shows Up When Jagga Jasoos recently moved—for the nth time—from its announced release date in April, director AnuragBasu assured sceptics that the decision was taken because they didn’t want to lose out on a young audience, many of whom would have school exams around this time. But now it appears that there may be more to it. Despite having been in production for nearly four years, the team hadn’t completed principal photography. Ranbir Kapoor was reportedly shooting patchwork bits for the film in Mumbai last week, thus sparking off speculation that the film won’t be ready for release anytime soon. Insiders say the film’s co-producer, Disney India, is losing patience, and has decided not to announce a fresh release date so as to avoid the embarrassment…